¹Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, 701 Tappan Street, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Correspondence: Ilia D Dichev, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, 701 Tappan Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1234, USA. Tel: +1 734 647 2842; E-mail: dichev@bus.umich.edu

Abstract

This comment starts with a personal account of experiences with business school rankings, which provides an introduction and illustration to the main points that follow. The first point is that noise dominates real news in published rankings, accounting for at least half and possibly much more of observed ranking changes. Thus, while ranking innovations have very real consequences in terms of applications, giving, and stakeholder perceptions, they need to be heavily discounted as carriers of new information. The second main point is that Devinney et al.'s finding of stable rankings for top schools and volatile rankings for lower-ranked schools is to be expected given what rankings measure and how they are constructed. Top schools reside in the thinly populated right tail of the school quality distribution, and therefore real differences in their quality are much more substantial and enduring than those for lower-ranked schools residing in more densely populated regions of this distribution. Published rankings, however, project these varying real differences into uniformly spaced ordinal rankings, obscuring the fact that ranking differences mean very different things for top schools and lower-ranked schools. The comment concludes with some ideas about how to improve the rankings.